The game of musical chairs that is the directing job on Philip Roth adaptation **American Pastoral **is not finished. Once slated for Fisher Stevens to tackle, the project has since been taken over by Australian director Phillip Noyce. But he’s also dropped out and now Ewan McGregor will be adding first-time director to his credentials, even as he remains the film’s lead.
Set during the Vietnam War years, **American Pastoral **follows Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov (McGregor), a once all-conquering high-school athlete, who’s married to a beauty queen (Jennifer Connelly) and runs the business he’s inherited from his dad. All seems well in Swede’s world until his daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning) joins the countercultural clamour of the time, signing up as a revolutionary and committing a fatal act of violence that throws all their lives into chaos.
John Romano wrote the script, which McGregor is now looking to start directing this September in Pittsburgh. And it appears he’s quite happy about the new job. “It’s a great privilege to be working with Lakeshore on Philip Roth’s astounding novel American Pastoral,” McGregor says in a statement picked up by Variety. “I’ve wanted to direct for years and wanted to wait until I found a story that I ‘had’ to tell and in this script I knew I had found that story.”